COP 24: The church of climate fear

By David Wojick|2018-12-04T01:17:09+00:00December 4th, 2018|Climate|Comments Off on COP 24: The church of climate fear

The mainstream press coverage of the beginning of the Katowice climate summit is sad but fascinating. There is a uniformly dogmatic sense of urgency based on fear, with very little news and a great deal of preaching. Fear is the dominant theme.

I truly pity the people who hold these false beliefs, as they must be afraid of the future. But I am not sympathetic with the alarmism, because it makes people dangerous. The preachers are calling on the faithful to change the world we live in, and not in a good way. Fear makes people angry and angry people are dangerous.

Here are just three examples of alarmist news coverage of the Katowice climate summit, a few among many.

From CNBC:

“In a strongly-worded statement, the WMO Deputy Secretary General Elena Manaenkova sought to highlight how important the issue of a warming planet was.

“Every fraction of a degree of warming makes a difference to human health and access to food and fresh water, to the extinction of animals and plants, to the survival of coral reefs and marine life,” she said.”

Quoting the preacher. Note that the UN WMO is co-owner of the UN IPCC. That every fraction is supposedly bad is truly scary. It is also false.

From the BBC:

“The naturalist David Attenborough has said climate change is humanity’s greatest threat in thousands of years. The broadcaster said it could lead to the collapse of civilisations and the extinction of “much of the natural world”. He was speaking at the opening ceremony of United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Katowice, Poland.” (Emphasis in original)

“Speaking at the opening ceremony, Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General, said climate change was already “a matter of life and death” for many countries.”

Here we have not just one, but two preachers of alarmist dogma.

LA Times:

“Three years after forging the landmark Paris climate accord, world leaders are meeting again to decide how to turn emissions-cutting pledges into action. But as talks kick off this week in Katowice, Poland, a disconnect between climate science and global politics threatens the ability of nearly 200 countries to come together to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

“An October report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that some of the most devastating effects of global warming will hit harder and sooner than previously expected and are likely to reach a tipping point without “far-reaching and unprecedented changes” to cut emissions within the next 12 years. A U.N. report released Tuesday found few nations are on track to meet the Paris targets, which themselves fall significantly short of achieving the emissions cuts needed to keep warming within levels tolerable to humanity. Without drastic, large-scale action, the assessment found, the planet is likely to see 3 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century.” (Emphasis added)

Note the need for “far-reaching and unprecedented changes” in the way we live. This is what makes the false fear of climate change so dangerous.

Except for the Trump-bashing you would never know that these endlessly repeated scary claims are controversial. Certainty is the essence of dogma and the climate scare preachers are certain that horror is nigh. In reality, and on the contrary, this green dogma is widely disbelieved, but there is no hint of that in the Katowice coverage.